The Spring Issue of Whisky Advocate is on the newsstand and features 114 whisky reviews.

Boom Times in Speyside

by Gavin D Smith

Blended Scotch whisky is taking the world by storm, selling rapidly in countries all over the world. To meet the demand for malt spirit required for blending purposes, new distilleries are being built on Speyside and existing ones are experiencing expansion and modernization. But this statement does not refer to 2014, as you might expect, but to the closing decades of the 19th century, and while there are many parallels between developments in the whisky making ‘golden triangle’ of northeast Scotland then and now, there are also, hopefully, some important differences.